Time and Times Again Show More Bias Against Israel

September 13, 2010

In
textbook examples, both Time magazine and The New York Times have once again
shown their hostility toward
Israel
. Bias comes in many
shapes and forms. It can be through misleading headlines, location of a story
within the publication, selective use of photos, facts omitted, sources sought
and choice of words. A couple of glaring examples from this past week highlight
such bias against
Israel
.

The same
week that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Abbas came to Washington to restart negotiations
between
Israel
and the Palestinians,
Time magazine came out with a cover story titled “Why Israel
Doesn’t Care About Peace.”

To support
this preposterous assertion, Time editor Richard Stengel made his regular
appearance on Thursday’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC to reveal the new cover and
cover story coming out last week in Time. The image on the cover of the
September 13th issue is the Star of David made of gerbera
daisies, which means cheerfulness. I discovered that by putting my cursor
over the image
of the cover, and it says so. So the message Time wanted to get out is that
Israel
is positively cheerful
and doesn’t care about peace.

Stengel went on the show and actually said the cover article is “Why Israel Doesn’t Want Peace,” which
is quite different from the notion of the actual title, “Why Israel
Doesn’t Care About Peace.” Both titles are absurd constructions. If the
editors at Time were attempting to more honestly characterize
Israel
’s position, they might
have awkwardly titled it, “Why Israel is Opposed to
the Current Formulation of the Two-state Solution.” That title would lead them
to a more honest answer. There can be no two-state solution until Hamas and the
Palestinian Authority (PA) unite and decide that they no longer have the
destruction of
Israel
, or the liberation of Palestine, as they prefer to say,
as their goal. There can be no “right of return” as the Palestinians envision
it, in which Jews in
Israel
would be outnumbered by
people staking a false claim to property and residence within
Israel
’s borders. It would
also become more plausible if Hamas and the PA ended their incitement against
Israel
, their attacks against
Israeli civilians, and celebration of terrorists, such as those who planned the Munich massacre of 1972.

Stengel
went on to say that “Most Israelis have basically decided, you know what, the
Palestinians are not a threat, the real threat is
Iran
, ‘we’re having a good
life, we don’t really care.’ That’s it, and in fact, what we’re seeing with
Netanyahu—I mean Netanyahu is a little bit out
ahead of a lot of his constituents, which I think is true, but in fact most
Israelis just don’t even care about peace any more. Don’t even think it’s
possible.”

Stengel said
“they haven’t had a car bombing in two and a half years,” and added that “The
sad truth really is that the wall with the West Bank has actually worked. Most
Israelis in the course of their life don’t come into contact with any Palestinians
at all. The wall is functioning.”

Yes,
Stengel actually said that the success of the security fence is a “sad truth.”

The Time article itself, by Karl
Vick, reads like a parody. Among photos of Israelis on the beach, or in clubs,
or otherwise whiling away the time, Vick states, “The truth? As three
Presidents, a King and their own Prime Minister gather at the White House to
begin a fresh round of talks on peace between
Israel
and the Palestinians, the truth is, Israelis are no
longer preoccupied with the matter. They’re otherwise engaged; they’re making
money; they’re enjoying the rays of late summer. A watching world may still
define their country by the blood feud with the Arabs whose families used to
live on this land and whether that conflict can be negotiated away, but
Israelis say they have moved on.”

Victor
Davis Hanson noted Vick’s tone and accusations in his National Review piece
titled, “For the Jews in Israel, Money
Trumps All?” “You see,” writes Hanson, “Vick
has discovered that the rather worldly Israelis, after stealing their land from
Arabs, don’t much care for the hard negotiations that the Obama administration
is now engaged in (“big elemental thoughts”), not when it is a matter of—yes,
making money: ‘With souls a trifle weary of having to handle big elemental
thoughts, the Israeli public prefers to explore such satisfactions as might be
available from the private sphere, in a land first imagined as a utopia.’”

You
get the idea. After seeing Stengel on Morning Joe, it is unclear how much of
this article is really the sentiments of Vick as opposed to those of Stengel
the editor, who has openly defended Time’s shift to transparently becoming an opinion
magazine, rather than obliquely being one. He has celebrated Time’s role as a
promoter of Barack Obama and his agenda.

Time has
had a long history of distorting stories about
Israel
, and CAMERA, the
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in
America
, has done an excellent
job documenting
it over the years.

Of course
Israel
wants peace, but they
don’t want a deal that looks like the deal being demanded by Abbas and Hamas, and being pushed by Obama. It is not
sustainable and would likely lead to more war. But until that day of peace
comes, Israelis hopefully will live with security, as enabled by a security fence, and first-rate intelligence that is not handcuffed by
political correctness. They don’t want another phony Oslo process that is meant
to deceive the world and gain advantage for the long term and oft stated goal
of the complete “liberation of Palestine,” meaning the end of Israel as a
Jewish state.

The highly
regarded website Honest Reporting responded to Time this way: “Perhaps the real reason Israelis have become apathetic to
the peace process (not peace itself, as the cover suggests), is because of the
way the world quickly forgets Israel’s numerous peace moves—Ehud Barak’s offer of a state at Camp David, Ariel
Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza, Binyamin Netanyahu’s settlement freeze. Yet the
media blames
Israel
for years of stalemate.

“While there
have been no parallel moves from the Palestinians to advance the peace process,
only ever-increasing demands on Israel, Vick gives the impression that the
Palestinians have been doing everything they can to make peace possible.”

Ironically,
Stengel’s comment that there hadn’t been a car bombing in two and a half years
came the same week that Hamas terrorists killed four Israelis. No, it wasn’t a
car bomb. As described by the New York Post, in a front-page story, “Hamas
terrorists yesterday murdered four innocent Israelis, one of them pregnant, in
a twisted attempt to derail President Obama’s peace summit in Washington … the
soulless thugs sprayed a car on the West Bank with dozens of bullets,
leaving behind a gruesome scene on a blood-stained road.”

Compare
that to how The New York Times covered the same story, on page 4: “The killing
of four Israeli settlers, including a pregnant woman, in the West Bank on
Tuesday evening rattled Israeli and Palestinian leaders on the eve of peace
talks in Washington and underscored the disruptive role that the issue of
Jewish settlements could play in the already fragile negotiations.”

The Times
did one of its classic depictions of a terrorist act against
Israel
in terms of it being a
setback for peace, with no mention of the victims, the brutality of the crime,
and the only thing regrettable is that this will now set back the phony “peace
process.”

Phyllis Chesler, author and professor, writing for Pajamas Media,
did an excellent job in analyzing
and parsing how the story was handled in the Times, The Wall Street Journal,
and the New York Post. Chesler states that “My point
here is simply this: If American journalists, professors, scholars, and
teachers read and trust only the New York Times, they will continue to
view ‘militant Israeli settlers’ as more blameworthy than Islamist Palestinian
terrorists. This view is confirmed by articles, editorials,
and op-eds which appear in their pages almost daily,
often two or three in each issue. In edition after edition, this point is made
over and over again.”

Another
irony here is that the current sticking point in negotiations is about whether
or not
Israel
is prepared to extend
its self-imposed moratorium on expanding settlements in the West Bank. Ironic because until
President Obama made a settlement freeze his earliest demand on
Israel
, it wasn’t really a
sticking point at all.
Israel
was expanding on a
natural growth basis in the existing settlements, and the Palestinians weren’t
demanding otherwise as a condition for negotiations, choosing instead to focus
on other issues.

Once again
the media—in this case Time and the Times—are doing
their best to prepare the world for a failed peace effort by preemptively
blaming
Israel
for not
caring enough about peace to bring a deal to fruition.